Category: Comedy

Colgate Comedy Hour, September 18, 1955

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Originally Published in La Furia Umana (Spring 2012)

On September 18th, 1955, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin hosted the Colgate Comedy Hour for the 27th time. It would be six months before they began shooting Hollywood or Bust, after which their preposterously successful union dissolved. But from 8 – 9PM on a studio set at NBC, they continued to work their alchemical comic magic, two perfectly poised bodies wreaking ingratiating destruction.

These Colgate Hours are the closest approximation we can get of their fabled live performances, which were filled with unrehearsed pranks and ebullient anarchy.  At the 21 minute and 35 second mark, a sketch begins that captures my imagined vision of their stage shows – a tongue-in-cheek tour-de-force of tightly sprung tension and a series of controlled manic releases. The camera descends on a stock shot of a pool room “just off Broadway”, where Dean is trying to win his money back in a game of nine ball. Told to hurry up and shoot, he raises his right hand and twists his wrist in an implied flip of the bird. His mates quiet down, and Martin will vainly attempt to conduct silence the rest of the sketch, mainly with his hands. It’s his rhythm and control that spurs and sustains the whole 20 minute piece.

Jerry enters wearing an oversized rain slicker and hat, visually already a man-child, and fumbles with the umbrella in a bit of business by the door.  Then Jerry’s alien presence stoops right beside Dean with a slack jawed stare, cowed only by a returned glance of disgust. Jerry steps back in this duet of mutual humiliation, and starts whistling. Dean calmly raises his right index finger and stops it in Jerry’s mouth, as if to staunch a spring in a dike. Dean is suave civilization, Jerry a particularly uninhibited embodiment of nature.

With Dean still trying to line up his shot, though, nature finds a way. Jerry bends over the table to eye it himself, and rainwater gathered in his peaked cap spills onto the felt. The dike has been loosed. Jerry directs the water into a corner pocket, which then blasts out of the opposite corner, spraying Dean in the face.

Jerry, his head bowed like a chastised puppy, becomes eager for instruction. Dean waves his hand left, and Jerry swivels his head in that direction, a bobble head of pure need. Hypnotized by Dean’s hand movements, he follows them wherever they point in a brilliant bit of pantomime. Maneuvered in front of a chair, Jerry robotically plops down after Dean’s quick wrist flip.

Order never lasts long in the Martin and Lewis altiverse, so Jerry wriggles out from Dean’s control by throwing over the elements for modern technology. Dean again tries to set up his Sisyphean shot, but Jerry’s order at the soda machine causes the clanking noises of a faulty Victorian-era furnace. Jerry’s bottle-opening screeches while his straw-sucking blasts as if over a loudspeaker. This is the repetition of the whistling bit, only amplified. Again Dean attempts to orchestrate silence (but not before an improv that almost makes Jerry break – passive aggressively dropping some soda in his mouth), twisting the straw into a knot and shoving it back into the bottle. Jerry, acknowledging his defeat, then repeats the earlier pantomime to himself, tracing those steps until he once again plops into the chair.

Martin & Lewis engage in a constant push-pull, but never manage to create any space between themselves, the gags inexorably bringing them closer together. Dean’s hands are sticky from the soda, so Jerry tries to help, covering them both in a penumbra of baby powder.  Now they are even visually connected, with a dusting of white covering their shoulders. The jokes increasingly become more hysterical and self-reflexive, with Jerry suddenly pretending to be a standup comic (he bombs) and then a songwriter (he kills). Dean is now the one left confused and adrift, his jerky reactions to hearing Jerry’s song on the radio (“Yetta I Can’t Forget Her”) nearly as spastic as his partner’s. As their identities shift and merge, by the end of the sketch they accept their contradictory unity and sing a song, called, aptly enough, “Side By Side”.

That they broke up less than a year later changes nothing. At that moment in time, they were an inseparable, insuperable comic force, a combustible union that would explode, reassemble and repeat ad infinitum; a glorious chaos that seemed it might never end. Until, impossibly, it did.

Wild at Heart: Jerry Lewis In Memoriam

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Originally Published in the November-December 2017 issue of Film Comment

By R. Emmet Sweeney

Jerry Lewis’s comedy tapped the energy of nightclub improv and an anarchic urge to bring the house down at any cost

Jerry Lewis started out as a record act. He would throw on some vinyl and do rubber-faced pantomime to pop hits of the day in front of audiences–the kind of routine Andy Kaufman would adapt to his own absurdist ends decades later. It was one of the lower forms of comedy, employed by those performers without sufficient material to pad out a set. But then he met Dean Martin, and multiple Jerry Lewises emerged on contact: the kid, the spastic, the genius, the monkey, the ego, the depressive, the loner, the sexist, the artist. We lost all of those Jerry Lewises and more when he passed away in August at age 91.

What Martin and Lewis had was something alchemical, and it turned their audiences into screaming mobs, like Beatlemania before the fact. Dean was the eye candy who also happened to possess a rapier wit, while Jerry was the idiot with an innate sense of timing and structure. It was a deconstruction of the usual nightclub routine, as Martin’s suave crooner would be continually undermined and tested by Lewis’s nasal-voiced waiter smashing plates and causing chaos. Early on in their 1946 run at the Havana-Madrid club in New York, Jerry was constantly coming up with ideas to make Dean laugh, and one night he came up with a plan to switch off the house lights in the middle of “Pennies from Heaven.” Though the band stopped playing, Dean didn’t miss a beat, flicking on his Zippo close to his face and finishing the song in rhythm. They had an innate sense of timing, down to each inhale. According to Jerry, Dean “watched me breathe. He knew my breath…knew to lay back until just the right moment.”

The act was largely improvised, and audiences craved the energy and unpredictability they provided, as opposed to the more highly controlled Hope and Crosby team. Whether acknowledged or not, it’s hard to avoid drawing a line from the Martin and Lewis improvisational form to the one pioneered by Del Close for Second City in the 1970s and ’80s. Though Martin and Lewis never codified their method to same degree as Del Close’s “Harold” structure, the duo abided by a general movement in the moment to combine the threads of their improv. As Lewis put it, “the act might have looked like chaos, but we could always get back to where we needed to get on a moment’s notice. We had that down to a gnat’s ass.”

In 1948, Martin and Lewis brought their act to Hollywood, debuting at Slapsy Maxie’s nightclub. The trip was also an opportunity to hear pitches from the movie studios. They ended up signing with Hal Wallis and Paramount, but the best offer might have been the one made by Republic Pictures. In his 2006 book Dean & Me (A Love Story), Lewis wrote that Republic “basically wanted to shoot our act in a nightclub. (An interesting idea–in hindsight!!).” It’s astonishing to think we could have had a feature-length documentary of their legendarily madcap stage routine but instead ended up with My Friend Irma (1949) as their first film appearance.

Nothing against My Friend Irma, which is perfectly pleasant and introduced Lewis’s Barry Fitzgerald impersonation to the world, but it shunted Martin and Lewis into supporting roles, their bits contained in a couple of side sequences. The closest we have to their stage act are their hosting appearances on The Colgate Comedy Hour, which have a flavor of anarchy, things pushed to the point of breaking down. There’s a great bit in an episode from November 12, 1950, where Martin is a dancing instructor and Lewis a student. Lewis dances like a marionette with his strings cut, so to keep any partner from harm he’s given a mannequin to dance with. After the dummy gets flailed to the ground, Martin jibes, “Don’t you know how to pick up a girl?” Lewis cracks a smile, and the audience suffers convulsive laughter. The sheer noise is astonishing.

Martin and Lewis’s movies together provide their own kind of laughter, especially those with director Frank Tashlin that recontextualize their rapport in his Looney Tunes aesthetic (e.g., Artists and Models). They broke up acrimoniously in 1956 over issues of creative control, as both were jockeying to be solo stars. Their influence on the baby boom kids, however, was incalcuable, bringing antic long-form improv to the masses. Lewis provided the vaudeville heritgae (his parents played the circuit) and Martin brought the more modern ironic cool, always distancing himself from the chaos (“I copied Bing Crosby 100 percent,” he told reporter Pete Martin). It was a perfect combination of the old and the new, executed with a relentless, unpredictable rhythm that both stars would try to replicate with others over the rest of their careers. Dean found Frank Sinatra, while Jerry found his other selves.

Jerry Lewis, or what became the common image of Jerry Lewis, was established post-Dean. Martin anchored him to an identifiable reality, but now the spastic loner, the out-of-joint kid with the nasal whine and rubber body, no longer had any physical boundaries. It is this particular Lewis that spawned Jim Carrey, who presents an equally acrobatic take on the idiot, though with more violent tendencies (Carrey wrote a touching memorial to Lewis in Time magazine). Whether it’s Herbert H. Heebert in The Ladies Man or Julius Kelp in The Nutty Professor, the Lewis figure is in a natural state of apartness and is in a fraught, oft destructive battle to join to the main stem of society. Herbert says, “Being alone can be very lonely. But at least with people around, you can be lonely with noise.”

Lewis’s directorial debut, The Bellboy (1960), is a tour de force of being lonely with noise, as his titular character is ignored by the Hotel Fontainebleau customers, rendering him silent as he navigates the labyrinthine hotel space, which he expands and contracts through his imagination–turning an empty auditorium into a chiming orchestra through the force of his conductor’s wand. The Bellboy established Lewis’s disjunctive use of time and space. As Chris Fujiwara wrote in his Contemporary Film Directors book, Jerry Lewis, “in his films, the gag–or, more generally, the moment, scene, episode, event, or block–distracts from and disconnects the plot.”

The Bellboy’s orchestra is unrelated to the action of the hotel, just like the big dance number in The Ladies Man, of Hubert entering one “Miss Cartilage”‘s room only to find that a vast white set and an MGM-musical-inspired sequence await him. His world is a discontinuous one, and the fragmentation extends to his identity, like the Julius Kelp/Buddy Love split in The Nutty Professor, or his portrayal of six uncles in The Family Jewels.

The break with Martin caused a gap in Lewis’s artistic practice, which he filled by other means. Fujiwara wrote that Lewis translated “Martin’s absence into a purely cinematic figure to play against.” He splits personalities and plays off of himself, or fractures the space and time of the film so he can play off an invisible orchestra–or have a heart-to-heart with a Southern Belle puppet as in his improbably moving scene with “Magnolia” in The Errand Boy. The fact that Magnolia might be his most fully realized female characater doesn’t say much for his treatment of women (nor does his late-in-life statement that they aren’t funny), but it does speak to the impossible sexuality of the Jerry Lewis man-child, ancestor of the Sandler/Apatow man-children that audiences so so fervently embraced in the 1990s and 2000s. His fear of women essentially is the plot of The Ladies Man, in which he works as a houseboy in an all-girls rooming house. The narrative gets derailed by gags and digressions and tour-de-force crane shots of the multistory dollhouse set, but in the end he hasn’t changed at all, his masculinity as fragile as ever.

All of which amounts to a fraction of the Jerry Lewises we could mourn. I’d like to think that Martin and Lewis have finally reunited and locked back into their old rhythms, cracking each other up to the roiling roar of a crowd. But just as in his movies, Lewis refuses such a tidy ending in Dean & Me: “I miss him every day I’m still here. I’ve considered the idea of our getting together again someday, but I believe when we die we are just put away and life goes on.”

An Appreciation of Anna Faris

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

August 21st, 2008

Anna Faris may finally be getting her due. After years of fearless and sparkling work in lowbrow spoofs and indie doodles, she’s starring in and executive producing a big Hollywood comedy, “The House Bunny.” Whether it’s worthy of her talents is yet to be seen, but it definitely heralds a new stage in her circuitous career, one in which she can start calling her own shots. If given the chance, she’s capable of out-dumbing Judy Holliday and out-ditzing Carole Lombard, or at least give them a run for their heiress money.

With the Apatow boys dominating the comedy circuit, there’s been little room for feisty female comediennes. Apatow’s art is based on absurdist riffs on macho man-children, the women serving as sullen straight gals. There are some exceptions, of course (Kathryn Hahn’s sex-starved wife in “Step Brothers,” Molly Shannon’s boozehound in “Talledega Nights”), but they simply serve to prove the rule. And that’s why Faris is such a bracing talent, with her brash physicality, slow-burn timing and endlessly expressive eyes that promise the kind of screwball pluck that David Denby is constantly mourning as lost in his New Yorker columns. While I’m much fonder of Apatow and the severely underrated Adam McKay than Denby, he’s right about the disappearance of the comic actress. Performers like Faris, Amy Adams and Isla Fisher are enormous talents, but there’s no room for female clowns when teenage males are the targeted customer.

Plucked from relative obscurity in Washington state to star in Keenan Ivory Wayans’s “Scary Movie,” Faris started her career in the raunchiest way possible. As a parody of the virginal scream queens that came before her, Faris’ Cindy Campbell was so pure that she shaved her tongue — though not the massive tuft of pubic hair beneath her electrified chastity belt — and she was funny because Faris played the insanity straight. Faris never oversells a joke, but lets it build around her until her incredulous puppy dog eyes expand to capacity and await the rapidly approaching punchline. With such comic instincts, she’s been compared to everybody from Lombard to Goldie Hawn. David Zucker, the director of the third and fourth “Scary Movies,” told Sara Corbett of the New York Times that “to do good comedy, you have to be smart, and Anna is smart. You could have an actual dumb blonde playing the dumb blonde role, but she wouldn’t have nearly the range.”

Faris was a brunette for the first two “Scary Movies,” and kept the dark hair for 2002’s indie “May,” where she plays the vamp, though a dotty one at that. Her Polly is a lesbian lothario with a thing for the title character, the mousy May (Angela Bettis), and her overeager come-ons are hilarious bits of bravado. She’s the devilish highlight in an otherwise uneven Carrie take-off.

It was with 2003’s small role in “Lost in Translation” that Faris established herself as the dumb blonde for the oughts. Stealing every scene she’s in with bubbly small talk banality, her shallow actress seems like a lot more fun than ScarJo’s morose misanthrope. The film has aged poorly, steeped in condescension towards modern Japan as well as Faris’ character Kelly. Kelly shows kooky vivacity in her few scenes on screen, pimping a power cleanse and belting out “Nobody Does it Better” as the main couple sneak on by. But watching it now, I’d much rather linger with Kelly’s screwy antics than bathe in the anomie of the rest of the film’s curdled hipsterism.

After this star-making performance… she didn’t become a star. Her small role in “Brokeback Mountain” aside, she soldiered through some middling fare in supporting roles, dishing an emasculating monologue in “Waiting…” (2005), nabbing a recurring role on “Friends” during the sitcom’s final season, and suffering through “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” (2006) as the doting third of a love triangle between Luke Wilson and Uma Thurman. It wasn’t until 2007, with Gregg Araki’s barely seen “Smiley Face,” that Faris displayed the full range of her talents. On screen for the whole film as stoner/slacker extraordinaire Jane, she manages a true comedic tour-de-force. Slouching through the film’s shaggy dog tale with slack-jawed grace, Faris hoods her eyes and slows down her delivery as she makes her way from Los Angeles to Venice, CA. There are a series of stunning sequences here, including an acting audition turned pot bust and an incoherent Marxist call to action, where every intonation is pregnant with humor as she shifts her patter from a slow murmur to a guttural shout. Every scene carries a surprise. It’s the kind of high-wire act that wouldn’t feel out of place in a screwball classic like “Twentieth Century,” only if the weed was replaced with champagne.

Funny or Die: DIY Comedy Takes a Victory Lap

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

February 29th, 2008

While the Oscar telecast was drawing its smallest audience ever on Sunday night, Will Ferrell’s Funny Or Die Comedy Tour was finishing up its sold-out eight date run with a raucous show at Radio City Music Hall. It was a carnivalesque take on your basic stand-up comedy gig — with glittery costume changes and group sing-a-longs breaking up (and into) the routines. Farrell (along with his alter egos) was the MC introducing the three young performers (Demetri Martin, Nick Swardson and Zack Galifinakis), all of whom have contributed videos to the the Funny or Die website.

The tour is a victory lap of sorts for the site, a YouTube for comic shorts that exploded into the mainstream when Ferrell and director Adam McKay joined forces with it. (Chris Henchy, the writer/producer of “Entourage,” is the third member of the site’s creative team.) Their sketch “The Landlord,” which turns McKay’s toddler daughter Pearl into a foul-mouthed slumlord, has been viewed over 50 million times, and encouraged other established comedians to post their own DIY absurdities — including John C. Reilly, Judd Apatow and Jack Black (my personal favorites are the violent environmentalist satire of “Green Team” and the “Drunk History” series which features Black’s randy Ben Franklin).

The charm and lifeblood of the site is the way that it allows amateur videos to brush up against the successes: in the site’s “Platinum Club” section, which lists all the videos that have received over one million hits, you’ll find not only a bunch of Ferrell videos, but a clever masturbation joke from the scruffy unknown Nick Thune. Funny or Die acts as both an entertainment and networking site — put up a video and Judd Apatow might select it as one of his favorites.

Venture capitalist Mark Kvamme first pitched the concept to the Creative Artists Agency and fronted the $17,000 to start up the site after a conversation with his teenage son. As the Mercury News’ Scott Duke Harris has reported, the company has evolved into “Or Die Networks,” and is now backed by $20 million. It’s started up sister sites “Shred Or Die” (for skateboarders), “My Blue Collar” (featuring Southern comics) and, apparently, “in the works is a culinary site to be called ‘Eat, Drink, or Die.’” With its brand fully in place, the Funny Or Die tour acts as its coronation into the big time, replete with movie studio backing.

The tour is promoting Ferrell’s (and New Line’s) upcoming movie “Semi-Pro,” and the site itself is laden with promos, interviews and trailers for the film. Aside from Radio City, every other tour date was set on a college campus, luring in that delectable 18-35 year old age group that studio execs drool over. All of which is good business, but it would be a mite distracting if the show wasn’t so inspired and almost entirely clear of cross-promotion itself. All the hucksters were outside the arena, with afro’d “Semi-Pro” hype men handing out swag and timid Funny Or Die interns blanketing folks with t-shirts. There was even a “Harold & Kumar” sighting — two guys in orange jumpsuits tossing out one-sheets for the Guantanamo Bay-set sequel. Variety has said that “Semi-Pro” is receiving “the kind of buzz building push that movie marketers dream of” from the tour, and a similar one might take place in support of the Jeremy Piven starrer “The Goods: The Don Ready Story,” the first feature being made under Ferrell and McKay’s production company, Gary Sanchez Productions.

Inside the theater, though, there was barely a whiff of money — just the overpowering stench of Ron Burgundy’s man musk. After two solid opening sets from Martin and Swardson, Ferrell’s most popular character took center stage. With McKay as the announcer, the crowd got a taste of how “Anchorman” was filmed — in a flurry of improvisation, each man trying to top the either with absurdist glee. In a revealing history of the poorly named “Frat Pack” in Sight & Sound, Henry K. Miller quotes director David O. Russell as calling “Anchorman” “a balance between performance art and narrative film.”

There wasn’t much narrative on this night. When Burgundy called out Tom Brokaw on stage at Radio City, the show turned into pure performative insanity. Brokaw immediately seemed to regret his decision to appear, but gamely soldiered through it, even when Burgundy asked him about the time Diane Sawyer went topless — or if he would smoke a vial of crack if it would save the president’s life. Brokaw parried by saying he’d give it to Farrell’s staff, who would probably eat it up. The whole interview seemed close to imploding at every turn, and at one point Brokaw turned his hostility to them, wondering whether the system should allow people our age to vote. Graceful as he is, he quickly maneuvered away from it, and they navigated back to safe waters — plugging his books (including Burgundy’s own “The Greater Generation: The Story of the ’69 Miracle Mets”), joking about hit and runs and saying goodbye.

It was a riveting performance by both men, even if one wonders if Brokaw entirely knew what he was getting into. It’s clear Farrell improvised most of the bit — audibly cracking up McKay behind the mic and getting energized by the unexpected combativeness of his foe.

After such a display, Zack Galifinakis could only lip-synch to “Tomorrow” in a Little Orphan Annie outfit and toss glitter in the air. It worked, as did his closing slam against Dane Cook. The evening ended with the whole production on stage, dressed in Capezio dance pants tucked into Uggs, warbling to Alicia Keys’ “No One” with reckless abandon. But they couldn’t let the night go without a nod to Friday’s release. Tight shortsed “Semi-Pro” co-star Woody Harrelson was roped in to stand up from his seat, awkwardly take a kiss from Will, and disappear into the poster-strewn night.

Why The Farrelly Brothers Deserve Your Love

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

October 1st, 2007

Bobby and Peter Farrelly, like it or not, are two of the most fascinating American directors of the past two decades. Despite taking routine critical beatings, the brothers have created a unified body of work, elaborating on their pet theme of what constitutes normality ever since Jeff Daniels’ monsoon of a bowel movement in “Dumb and Dumber” (1994). Each successive film follows a remarkably similar trajectory to that debut hit: a social outcast (usually scarred by the loss of a loved one), embarks upon a journey to achieve a goal that will restore their dignity. They fail. After this disappointment, they realize the social norms they’re straining for are bullshit, and their self-respect is restored, if only to spite society-at-large. This pattern is consistent all the way through to “Stuck on You” (2003), and their latest, “The Heartbreak Kid,” looks to continue it by way of a honeymoon road trip.

Then there’s the flood of bodily fluid punch lines that are the core of their comedy — those outrages upon the anatomy, semen hair gel or adult breastfeeding, that immediately invalidate any claim to middle-brow respectability. They’ll never be taken as seriously as Judd Apatow — whose “Knocked Up” The New York Times’ A.O. Scott called an “instant classic,” and which inspired a few think-pieces about the state of American comedy (David Denby’s grumpy “A Fine Romance” in The New Yorker). Apatow is forgiven his vulgarity and birthing sight gags because of his underlying sentimentality, the “serious” way in which he handles the effect of pregnancy on a relationship. The Farrellys aren’t cut that slack, even though their recent work has become increasingly personal and joltingly emotional — far more daring, and much more moving than Apatow’s closed-off world of sarcastic young suburbanites.

The key to the Farrellys’ films, as vague as it might sound, is their generosity. It extends from their hiring of friends and family as extras and the use of location shooting in their hometown to the video packages that end each film. “Me, Myself, and Irene” (2000) ends by showing still photos of every actor who was cut out, while “Shallow Hal” (2001) closes with images of all the behind-the-scenes tech workers. These gestures are representative of the democratic way in which the comedies are made (everyone’s encouraged to suggest jokes) — and that spirit seeps into the films. The stories consist of a search for this feeling of community — as the classic Farrelly character has fallen outside of the proscribed normal lifestyle. In “Dumb & Dumber,” Carrey and Daniels are idiots who break every possible social code because they aren’t aware of them. In “Kingpin” (1996), Roy Munson (Woody Harrelson) is a disgraced (and poor) bowler with a hook for a right hand, while “Irene”‘s Charlie is the town punching bag, a pathetic cuckold that pigtailed girls curse off the street.

One of the major markers of outsider status in their films is mental or physical disability — and this makes people nervous. Whether it’s the treatment of schizophrenia in “Irene,” mental disability in “Mary” and “The Ringer” (produced by the Farrellys’ in 2005), or the conjoined twins in “Stuck On You” — there’s always the accusation that these people’s disabilities are being laughed at, which is never the case. They are presented without pity or condescension as independent individuals, never defined by their disability, just people with vices and faults of their own. A childhood friend of Peter Farrelly, Danny Murphy, became a quadriplegic after a diving accident, and has appeared in every film since “Kingpin” (1996), and in all of them he plays an acid-tongued bastard — flipping the switch that chops off Munson’s ill-fated hand.

The Farrelly hero, after expressing contempt for the status quo, searches for a new community to belong to — every film (aside from Hal), arranges this in the form of a journey, either to search for a loved one or to rejuvenate their careers. This pursuit fails (as it does in “Dumb & Dumber,” “Kingpin,” and “Stuck on You”), or succeeds only after the character rejects the social codes he originally hoped to live up to (as in “There’s Something About Mary” and “Shallow Hal”). In both cases, traditional morality is proven false or overthrown, and the line between normal and abnormal is blurred. New splinter communities are formed or maintained: “Dumb & Dumber”‘s Lloyd and Harry maintain their country of two; “Kingpin” ends with an Amish village forming an alliance with Roy and his girl; Mary’s final group is a circle of obsessives that surround the central couple; “Me, Myself, and Irene” affirms the relationship between Charlie and his bastard children; Hal joins a merry band of Peace Corps volunteers; and “Stuck On You”‘s Walt and Bob end the film in a triumphant shot-countershot that emphasizes their new-found independence while also re-integrating them into their hometown (after nailing a musical number with Meryl Streep).

While the content has remained consistent, the box-office has dwindled. Every film since “There’s Something About Mary” has made less than the previous one, decreasing until “Stuck On You” (their masterpiece) made only $34 million domestically, five times less than Mary. This despite their increasing visual sophistication (“Stuck On You”‘s superb use of the 2.35:1 frame) and emotional delicacy — it’s what Peter calls the “sensitve trilogy” (“Hal,” “Stuck on You,” “The Ringer”) that has tanked the worst. In order to recover their fans, it seems, they need to restore a higher joke-to-drama ratio, or at least return to more bankable stars than Jack Black, Kinnear-Damon and Johnny Knoxville. Their next film following the trilogy, “Fever Pitch” (2005), was a contract job — for the first time they had no input into the screenplay or casting — and it has little relevance to the rest of their work. Their stock has fallen to the point where their name isn’t even used in most promotional material for “The Heartbreak Kid.” The success of “Kid,” their most commercial sounding (and R-rated) film in years, may determine how much freedom they have in the future — and may be the deciding factor in whether their long-gestating Three Stooges project (with Russell Crowe as Moe!) gets out of the planning stages. Here’s to hoping “Kid”‘s a blockbuster.

Black Sheep: Mon Oncle (1958)

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September 26, 2017

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“That would be the ideal film. I would like people to see Hulot less and less and to see other people or characters more and more.” – Jacques Tati

With Mon Oncle (1958), Jacques Tati gets closer to making his ideal film. The character of Hulot gets pushed further and further into the background until he often disappears, letting nearly everyone else in town take center stage. Hulot’s role is to set a disastrous mechanism into motion, then stroll offscreen with charming obliviousness. He is inimical to the quickly modernizing world of the film, able to find the flaw in any advanced doohickey and reduce it to a smoking, blubbering mess in a matter of minutes. Hulot is forever putting the brakes on technological advancement, while the rest of his family is installing the latest and greatest in household tech, from a motion-sensor garage door to a fish water fountain. While his family tries to automate and smooth out their lives, Hulot prefers to live in the grit and grime, in an old rickety house covered in dust and layered with history. Tati uses set and sound design to separate Hulot from his contemporaries, going from the squeaky clean lines of his sister’s ultra-modern home to the clatteringly labyrinthine staircase of his apartment building. Hulot is a man of out of time, trying to impart his destabilizing spirit to his little nephew, the only relative susceptible to his charms.

Mon Oncle opens and closes with scenes of stray dogs fanning out into an alley, eating garbage, urinating and making the world their home. The title appears in chalk on a brick wall, as if this was a post-apocalyptic thriller rather than a slapstick comedy. But all of Tati’s films have this “out-of-time” feeling, since Tati himself felt so upset about the massive re-development changing the French cityscape. Tati told Bert Cardullo (quoted in World Directors in Dialogue): “What bothers me today is that Paris itself is being destroyed. This really aggravates me. If we need additional housing, and God knows we do, let’s build new cities. There is enough room. But we should not demolish nice old buildings in Paris for the sake of new apartment buildings. Paris will end up looking like Hamburg. And it is uniformity that I dislike.” And it is uniformity that he skewers relentlessly in his design of Charles and Madame Arpel’s home (Hulot’s brother-in-law and sister played by Jean-Pierre Zola and Adrienne Servantie), a boxy glass-walled modern edifice in which everything is connected but nothing functions. It is an especially dour place for Hulot’s nephew Gérard (Alain Bécourt), who finds few places to play in the ascetic setup. Even the backyard is landscaped to an inch within its life, and one hopscotches over it rather than walks through it.

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It is Tati’s first film released in color (he shot Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday [1953] in color but it was distributed in B&W), and he uses it to further establish a sense of place. The Arpel home is weak pastel, gray-blue with a smidge of green in the yard. Rather institutional in its color scheme. Hulot’s neighborhood though, is all earth tones, what Tati called, “old, velvety colors.” Hulot lives in what seems like a simulacrum of a small French village, on which probably no longer existed when Tati made the film. But he is a nostalgist for this kind of place, having fond memories of going to delis with his grandmother, “there was some sawdust on the floor, they cut us some thin slices of salami to give us a taste of it, the room smelled deliciously of oak and pepper.” Today, Tati said, “when you go to a restaurant it’s as if you were eating in a clinic.” Hulot’s home is a remarkable construction meant to channel these childhood memories. It is shot head-on in long shot, so when Hulot descends the stairs we can make out his entire journey from top-to-bottom in one sequence, tracking his progress through windows and balconies, his bopping head giving him away. This kind of “dollhouse” shot is one that Wes Anderson liberally borrowed in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

This set is not just that one trick-shot though, it is a living organism that Hulot has to manipulate to keep people happy. In order to make a caged bird sing it’s morning song, he has to manipulate one of his windows so it reflects a beam of sun onto the animal – only then will it start its song. And every day upon departure he provides the girl on the bottom floor with candy or a kind word (by the end of the film she’s grown from a tween to an adolescent while his nephew never seemed to age at all – time does strange things in Hulot’s world). Hulot is always leaving the apartment to pick up Gérard from school. Gérard is a cooped up kid who has found an escape with his ne’er do well uncle and a group of prankster kids. Their favorite routine is to wait for a pedestrian to walk near a lamp post, whistle as if calling them and betting on whether they will run into the post.

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Eventually though, Hulot has to take the boy home, and the construction of that home is one of Tati’s great achievements, a totem to conspicuous consumption without a thought to functionality. And Tati uses sound design to activate multiple levels of the screen space. In one segment Madame Arpel is complimenting a neighbor on her hat in the foreground, while in the background Gérard is cleaning his shoes on the welcome mat, that scraping sound nearly blotting out his mother’s conversation. Everything in a Tati frame matters, there is no centering character. While your eye automatically drifts to Hulot, since Tati is such a master of pantomime, he often wanders out of frame, so you are forced to find other jokes – like the two circular windows that look like eyelid-less eyes, or the great sucking sound of the fish fountain, which Madame Arpel turns on and off depending on the importance of the guest. There is a whole rhythm to the house’s apparatus, the fountain “sucking,” the front door buzz, the soft “thunk” of a glass door closing, one might be able to map the comings and goings of each character just based on the sound design.

Needless to say when they have a dinner party Hulot starts breaking down the Arpel’s much sought-after order. He does the same at the rubber hose factory they get him a job at – the hose ends up looking like sausage, the disposal of which is an adventure on its own. There are so many visual gags, layered into each intricately arrayed sequence, it’s almost enough to be distracted by the solitude of it all. For while Hulot was the center of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, here he seems more peripheral, his final expulsion a natural extension of the plot. The final images, rather touching ones, find Charles and his son Gérard ultimately bonding over the lamp post prank. What had been a completely combative relationship has softened in a shared bond over slapstick violence. But Hulot is gone, and they don’t miss him.

Summer Daze: Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953)

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September 19, 2017

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The first screen appearance of Jacques Tati’s Hulot character is inside of a car: a clattering, jittering wreck making its way to a seaside hotel in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953). Tati cuts from the sound of a train horn to the pitter-putter of Hulot’s gasping car engine as it turns the corner of a country lane. The train is carrying the middle-class vacationers to their summer home, but Hulot always travels his own circuitous path. He yearns to be part of the group, but is forever getting sidetracked, by everything from funerals to fireworks. The character of Hulot, established here and elaborated on in three more films (Mon Oncle [1958], Playtime [1967] and Trafic [1970]), is baffled by modern technology and remains continually tangled up in it, reaching an apotheosis in the shimmering urban Hulot-trap of Playtime.  Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday is a gentler affair, though it establishes the unsteadiness and peculiar launching qualities of his springlike body. Like his car, he is as unsteady as a reed in a wind, and the slightest stumble will launch him into the next zip code. But he will always circle back home, hoping to get a few moments’ peace before getting launched once again.

Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday was shot in St. Marc-sur-mer in Brittany, on France’s northwestern coast. It was, and reportedly still is, a sleepy seaside resort town – you can still rent rooms in the same (extensively remodeled) Hotel de la Plage, now part of the Best Western chain. Tati shot on location during the summer and autumn of 1952, with the crew staying at the hotel. It remained open to the public, so if you were staying there during that year, you probably made it into the film as an extra. The rest of the cast was filled with relative unknowns  (Lucien Fregis as the hotel manager) or acquaintances (Nathalie Pascaud, who plays the young blond Martine, was a friend of a friend). As with Jour de fête(1949), which I wrote about last week, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday doesn’t have much of a plot, but instead is a series of vignettes documenting a day in the town, slices of life that are then shredded by Hulot’s bumblings and stumblings (Tati made multiple edits to the feature, the final cut in 1978 – the original 1953 cut is offered as a bonus feature on FilmStruck).

The film begins, not with Hulot, but with a visual gag at a train station. A group of heavily packed vacationers wait on a middle platform. A noisy unintelligible voice on the intercom starts babbling, and the group, as one amorphous blob, runs to the platform at the bottom of the screen. But then a train starts rolling in at the platform at the top of the screen, and so on and so forth until the rabble finally gets on their train of choice. Shot with a static locked camera, Tati makes the train station look alien, almost inhuman, and the vacationers like a panicked mob. Later, a packed bus ride gets the same treatment – it is so filled with humanity a little boy is sitting inside the opening in the steering wheel. Compared to that, Hulot’s shivering little car doesn’t seem so embarrassing. He putters along at his own pace, breaking down every few miles, sure, but he’s not packed in like sardines. In these travel sequences you can really appreciate Tati’s manipulation of the soundtrack, the cut from a train horn to Hulot’s clattering car immediately emphasizes its fragility and its unconventional nature. The car sounds like it has emphysema, whereas the train is all brawn and strength.

When Hulot finally levers his reedy body out of the vehicle and into the hotel, it is already full with social circles fully formed, and it is near impossible for him to ingratiate himself. And it is here we first see Hulot in full, with the peaked cap, bobbing pipe and that angled, bouncing walk. Biographer David Bellos describes Hulot’s posture as a “‘corporeal structure’ vaguely reminiscent of Giacometti’s spidery lines.” He is spread out in all directions but somehow with a solid center of gravity. Then there is that unchangeable expression on his face which scholar Michel Chion described as “indefinable, somewhere between worry, stupidity, and polite neutrality.”

In the early going Hulot cannot manage the space of the hotel, he is just spilling all over the place. Each door he opens lets in a gale force wind, as if a twister had hit in the lobby. At check-in the tobacco in his pipe is so overflowing the hotel manager has to pluck it out of his mouth so he can speak. This is just the first of endless incursions into other people’s personal space. Even when he’s alone he annoys – during the post-dinnertime lull, he sits alone and plays an absurdly loud jazz record, jolting everyone out of their restful state. Hulot, both by accident and by design, is something of a prankster, so the only people who gravitate towards him are a little boy who gives him a run for his money at ping-pong, and the young beauty Martine, for whom Hulot is a charming respite from incessant male flirtation (from both insufferable Marxists and capitalists alike).

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The most moving vignette depicts a scantily attended masked ball – there are a few children napping in their seats, Hulot and Martine. Hulot shows up in an elaborate pirate outfit, while Martine swoops in wearing a mask and skirt. She enters while he is futzing with the record player behind a curtain – and, just before she is about to depart, he emerges, and they giddily dance around the empty room. It is a moment when the two souls in the town seeking adventure have found each other, and Hulot does not stumble or collapse. In fact he is quite nimble as they skip around the dance floor. It is a short-lived moment, but an exquisite one, showing that the Hulot character, though aloof and oblivious to the world so much of the time, is capable of joining it in full when he discovers someone with the same out-of-step sensibility. It is a transitory moment, and Hulot is swept along by his own momentum as he crashes a funeral, and in the final spectacular stunt, sets off a whole shed of fireworks in a display of sublime idiocy. He ends the summer with a bang, but leaves much as he began, alone in that fussy old car. He gives Martine’s empty room one final look (she left without a goodbye), and drives offscreen, leaving us with an image of the emptied out town. It ends with a stamp being placed on a picture, turned into a postcard, a memory Hulot will keep close to his heart during the further solitary adventures that await him.

The Postman: Jour de Fête (1949)

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September 12, 2017

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After a decade-long career as a music-hall performer, Jacques Tati transitioned to feature filmmaking witha comedy about a remarkably gullible postman. Before Tati invented the iconic bumbling bourgeois Hulot (in M. Hulot’s Holiday, 1953), he experimented with a clumsy working class letter carrier, prone to insecure bouts of drinking and falling flat on his face. Jour de fête (1949) exhibits Tati’s elastic expertise at mime, including a tour-de-force drunk bike ride, as well as displaying his immediate talents as a director, constructing brilliantly funny gags through choreography and sound design. All of the gags generate from a small town’s resistance to and obsession with technological advancement, especially as trumpeted by the Americans. Tati eyes all this talk of modernization with a gimlet eye, preferring instead to linger on the absurdities of small town life before they disappear forever.

Having made a name for himself on the music hall circuit, Tati made his way into short films, and gained some notoriety  under René Clément, who directed him in the boxing comedy Soigne ton gauche (1936, for which Godard punned on the title for his Keep Your Right Up/Soigne ta droite). It was in this short that Tati took note of the bicycle riding postman played by Max Martel. This character would be the inspiration for his 1947 script The School For Postmen (1947), though in the interim he would be trying to avoid the German occupation government forces, who were seeking him out to work in Berlin for the Nazi organization “Strength Through Joy” as part of the compulsory work service. Instead he ditched them and hid out in the middle of the country in Le Marembert, four miles from Sainte-Sévère, which would be the location of Jour de fête. Tati and his friend Henri Marquet (a co-writer/actor in Jour de fête) chose Le Marembert as a town to hide out in because, Tati’s daughter explains in the documentary A L’Americaine (also on FilmStruck as a supplement to Jour de fête), “They jabbed a pencil into a map of France, Sainte-Sévère is smack in the middle.”

Tati himself continued that “once there, I was surprised. It was wartime, but in Sainte-Sévère, you’d never have known it. It’s fantastic to see people who know how to live. I thought if I made a film one day, I’d shoot it there.” He would stay true to his word, and retained the image of Max Martel’s postman. This would lead to the 1947 short The School For Postmen, a trial run for Jour de fête, in which his bicycling letter carrier is obsessed with proving that he can deliver the mail as fast as modern American technology allows. Originally slated to be directed by René Clément, his dropping out allowed Tati the opportunity to get behind the camera. And it was this experience that led him to believe he could extend this character out to feature length. He shot from May to December of 1947 in Sainte-Sévère, using it as his outdoor set. It was to be shot in a new color process called Thomsoncolor, but it was unstable and acceptable prints could not be struck. So it was distributed in B&W and that is how it is widely known today. However, in 1964 Tati did a re-edit with some painted in color by his friend Paul Grimault, and in 1994 a full color version was struck from the original negatives. All three versions are available to view on FilmStruck.

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The story, such as it is, involves the fair coming into to Sainte-Sévère and upsetting the natural tempo of the town. The café owner starts re-painting all his tables and chairs, a tad upsetting to his newly stained patrons, while one of the carnies flirts with one of the local girls. Through these side stories stumbles the insecure postman François (Tati), who endures spitballs from the local kids and endless gibes and pranks from the adults, mostly egging him into drinking games. Too eager to please to ever really object or fight back, he instead complains softly to himself. His track through town becomes an obstacle course of townspeople, carnies and kids all trying to distract him or rile him up, and he either ends up blackout drunk in a train car or roped into helping out someone else with their work (setting up a flagpole, cleaning up farmland, fixing a player piano). These are all intricately arranged set pieces that choreograph a whole village in motion (while the camera remains fairly static). The movement in the frame is never ending, and Tati is ever-eager to cede the frame to a better punchline, whether it’s the cross-eyed spike-driver (he needs to be positioned just a bit to the side) or the hunchbacked old gossip who fills in the details of every nook and cranny of the neighborhood; this 90 minutes feature somehow maps the whole town while also finding time to sketch each individual personality.

What François values above all is his job, so when he views a newsreel of all the new U.S. postal delivery technology, from helicopter drops to automated sorting machines, he blows a gasket and tries to prove he can match the Americans’ speed with his own two-wheeler. What ensues is nothing less than a Buster Keaton-esque study in human transportation gone awry, like in Sherlock Jr. (1924) when he loses his driver and rides a motorcycle side-saddle to a series of death-defying near misses. In Tati’s case he just loses his bicycle, which starts riding down the road on its own, as if possessed by a demon. Tati chases it down as if his life depended on it because his reputation hinges upon this mere mode of transportation. His bike goes through all forms of indignities – losing wheels, getting caught on a railroad crossing gate, getting dunked in a river. But it’s all for the greater good (or so François believes), of delivering the mail with speed, “American-style,” he keeps saying. So he is sticking the mail in grain sorters, shoving it on a butcher’s cutting board (which swiftly gets chopped), and sticking it under a horse’s tail. No time for customer service, as long as the mail gets delivered, no matter the condition, he will be satisfied. That is, until he can move no more, and the old hunchback drags him out of the water and tells him, “News is rarely good, so let it take its sweet time.”

Tati prefers the town stay as it is. But his depiction is already old-fashioned, as these towns became more mechanized, less personable. And so he had found a theme that would carry him through the films to follow, though he would need a new character, one more upwardly mobile to explore the ever dehumanized city, if not less prone to pratfalls. So Monsieur Hulot was born: the latest, and certainly the most oblivious cog in the industrial machine.

New Weird America: Something Wild (1986)

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September 5, 2017

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To view Something Wild click here.

Something Wild (1986) is a road movie with a penchant for detours, keeping its eyes on the side roads and rest stops instead of the highway in front of it. A shapeshifting romantic-comic thriller, it adjusts its tone to the landscape, paying as a romcom in NYC, a chase film in Pennsylvania and a horror movie in Stony Brook. The only thing that ties together the film are the rest stops and delis the movie’s increasingly unhinged characters stop into for snacks, robberies, and a break from the world outside. Each location provides more subcultures for the insatiable eye of director Jonathan Demme to explore, whether it’s the tiny liquor store manager with a giant pipe or a duo of style conscious old thrift store biddies, Demme imbues every scene with indelible personalities, making the film a kind of American oddball panorama in which two star-crossed lovers keep criss-crossing through.

Jonathan Demme wasn’t sure he would make another big narrative film after Swing Shift (1984) was taken away from him by Warner Bros. It didn’t seem all the time and effort was worth it if he didn’t have any control over the final product. But he took another chance on Something Wild because he loved the script by E. Max Frye, about hip con artist Lulu (Melanie Griffith) who picks up and seduces a square banker named Charlie (Jeff Daniels) and encourages him to indulge his wild side, from childish dine-and-dash to slightly more dangerous subversions. It spins off into more intense and violent digressions from there, as Lulu’s sociopathic husband Ray (Ray Liotta) rages into the story, eager to seek vengeance on Charlie for absconding with his wife. Ranging from NYC to Pennsylvania to Virginia and back.

The further they get from NYC, the more their wardrobes shift – Charlie’s goes from drab brown suit to shorts and skeleton sunglasses, while Lulu transforms even more, from her severe black bangs and endless bracelets, to a spiky short blonde cut and a blue-and-white peasant dress. But while their outfits get more innocent, their actions tiptoe around legality. It is a film about the relationship between personality and place, how much we define ourselves by our past and present homes, and how much of what we thought was our true selves can shift when thrust into a new town, new clothes, and sitting next to a new girl. What seemed like a promising career track back in the city might now seem like prison.

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Demme loved to scour the locations of his shoots (Tallahassee stood in for PA) for local color, and the film is bursting with side characters I would be eager to watch a whole movie about. Such as the roly-poly biker who rides along with his dog, or the gas station attendant who recommends that Charlie buy some shorts. Jeff Daniels spoke to People Magazine in 1987 about the atmosphere on the set:

“‘Jonathan listens to any idea, no matter how idiotic. And he tries a lot of them, because sometimes they work,’ says Jeff Daniels, who co-starred in Something Wild with Melanie Griffith. “I might turn around and see this dog on a motorcycle or a black hitchhiker wearing a cowboy hat. You know you’re walking through a Jonathan Demme movie because of the things he puts behind you and around you. There’s an improvisational feeling to everything he does.”

That feeling translates to the screen, as it bursts with activity. As Charlie, Jeff Daniels channels Demme’s affable people person – he insists on calling strangers by their first name, trying to make each purely commercial transaction more of a personal one. Early on this just means he speaks to waitresses with a solicitous tone – but later on it plays a pivotal part in Charlie’s recovery. He has had his nose broken by Ray, and needs to change out of his bloody shirt. Ray Liotta, by the way, is a demonic ball of coiled energy, and in an interview with David Poland Frye recalled how Daniels was scared by him during their first rehearsal. He can seemingly flex his entire body into a fist – and he plunges it at Charlie repeatedly. Anyway, back to the present, with Charlie at the gas station. He addresses “Nelson” by name to fill up his career, and, bemused by this weird white guy in skeleton glasses, Nelson asks Charlie about his bloody shirt.

Charlie realizes the state of his outfit, and requests a whole new change of clothes, stripping down to his skivvies in the store while Nelson just deadpans, “Charlie, attempt to be cool.” That line is Charlie’s entire existence in a nutshell, straining to be cool but instead landing flat on his face. At least until Lulu showed up. Lulu is an enigma when we first see her, dressed like an extra in a Bangles video with a jangling array of bracelets and necklaces covering up her arms while her face is framed by jet black bangs. She looks like danger, and she is, but the further Lulu and Charlie drive, the more their lies start to wear out, and they begin to learn the truth about each other. By the end very little is left of either of them, both reduced to essential parts, Charlie retaining his gentle nature and Lulu her shapeshifting unpredictability. The NYC they return to is no longer the one they left – having lost the ability to lie about themselves they will have to reinvent themselves anew, adapting to the shifting city around them.

Another Day in the Country: Picnic on the Grass (1959)

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August 22, 2017

PICNIC ON THE GRASS, (aka) DEJEUNER SUR L'HERBE,LE, (seated)Paul Meurisse, 1959

For Jean Renoir Picnic on the Grass was both a return and a departure. It was filmed in and around the country estate of Les Collettes, his late father’s land, where he had grown up as a child. It is the perfect setting for this back-to-nature comedy in which a scientist (and hopeful presidential candidate), is lured away from the world of the mind for that of the flesh. But instead of using this return to indulge in nostalgia or reiterate the naturalistic style of his still-famous triumphs – Renoir pushes further into farce and caricature. Picnic on the Grass is a broad and joyful comedy that was inevitably compared with Rules of the Game (1939) and Grand Illusion (1937), which had been restored and re-released around the same time, and so Renoir was compared to his previous self, and found wanting. Jonas Mekas, writing in The Village Voice in 1960, had a profound experience watching Picnic on the Grass and was baffled by its failure – he wrote: “I hear the critics did not like it. Who are the critics? Critics like to talk big – poor nearsighted things! They do not see beauty even when it is there.” FilmStruck presents us with another opportunity to see this beauty, so I attempted to find it there.

Picnic on the Grass was marked by the death of Gabrielle Renard, the nanny who raised Jean Renoir and became one of his father’s models. She brought Jean to see his first film in 1897 at the Palais des Nouveauté. Biographer Pascal Merigeau relates that the screening “threw him into a panic” and that Gabrielle had to rush him outside to calm down. She was a beloved figure in his life, and he devotes many tender passages to her in his memoirs, including these memorable closing lines:

As I bid farewell to the landscape of my childhood I think of Gabrielle. Certainly it was she who influenced me most of all. To her I owe Guignol and the Theatre Montmartre. She taught me to realize that the very unreality of those entertainments was a reason for examining real life. She taught me to see the face behind the mask, and the fraud behind the flourishes. She taught me to detest the cliché. My farewell to childhood may be expressed in very few words: ‘Wait for me, Gabrielle.’

Gabrielle passed away on February 26, 1959, and Picnic on the Grass began shooting in July in Les Collettes, where they had originally formed their bond so many years before.

PICNIC ON THE GRASS, (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe), Paul Meurisse, Catherine Rouvel, 1959

Renoir had been working on the script since 1958, when he registered a 32-page treatment. The story concerns Etienne Alexis (Paul Meurisse), a television-famous scientist whose main political position is mandatory artificial insemination as a way to increase intelligence in children. Despite this frightening proposition, through complete voter apathy he is likely to be the next president of Europe. That is, until he takes a fateful picnic with his equally ascetic bride-to-be/girl scout leader Marie-Charlotte (Ingrid Nordine). A satyr-like shepherd plays his flute for his goat, conjuring up a strong wind that blows past Etienne’s party and magically juices their libidos. As friends and assistants start canoodling under the trees (reminiscent of the scene in Elena and her Men [1956] with a mass-peasant makeout session), Etienne and his new chambermaid Nénette (Catherine Rouvel) begin an extended flirtation that might bring down his entire candidacy. While his advisers continue to set-up a wedding with Marie-Charlotte, Etienne’s eyes keep roaming to Nénette, a disarmingly direct farm girl who was seeking artificial insemination because she had never found a man worth her time.

Renoir cast Catherine Rouvel after being introduced to her after a screening of Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948). She had just turned nineteen, and Pascal Merigeau believes she reminded him of Gabrielle: “Returning to Les Collettes and his father’s house, among the olive trees, on the banks of the river, Renoir recommuned with his youth, rediscovered Gabrielle’s former features and soft curves, as well as Dedee’s, his first love, in Catherine Rouvel.” There is a resemblance, at least going by Auguste Renoir’s many portraits of Gabrielle, and Rouvel dazzles in the part, presenting Nénette as supremely self-confident in her naïveté – a completely charming creation.

Now in the twilight of his career, he was struggling to secure funding for new projects, and would end up producing Picnic on the Grass himself, necessitating a lower budget and tight shooting schedule. It was filmed over 20 days, reusing the studio and crew from The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment (1959), his TV adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which he had completed earlier in the year. Precise blocking was drawn out with chalk on the floor, and the actors had to follow them. Renoir later regretted the restrictions the budget required, complaining that working in this way “kills something extremely important, which is the actor’s surprise at being faced with the scenery.”

But Renoir tended to rate his own features based on financial returns, and the film was essentially ignored upon release, and gave Renoir “a pathological distaste for all the processes relating to film or television.” But looking at it outside of the pressure cooker of Renoir’s box office expectations, it’s a film that lives in the zone between the ridiculous and the sublime, happy to look the fool in search of what Renoir valued in life – which according to this film is, in no particular order: lazing about the riverside, eating heartily and sex (preferably outside). Renoir is deeply discouraged by modernity, opening on a parody of the evening news – which spends more time on his pending nuptials than his grotesque plan for population control. It is prescient in depicting how news was sliding ever closer towards entertainment.

Renoir’s POV comes through most clearly in a monologue by a priest out on a walk, telling Etienne what he thinks about his technocratic capitalism.

“Tomorrow you’ll send us to the moon. And, pray tell, what will we do up there on the moon? Do you think we’ll be happier there than under the shade of our olive trees? Scientific dictatorship will be a fine mess. We built the Notre-Dame, we built Chartres. We covered the Earth with cathedrals and churches. You? You’re covering it with factories. You must admit that the smoke from our incense is less damaging to the atmosphere than your atomic radiations. It appears that men enjoy being poisoned.

But, as Renoir well knows, whether or not he disapproves of the flow of history, it will flow on anyway, so you might as well get pleasure where you can. So Etienne and Nénette find themselves in each other, and that will have to be enough.

This is the thirteenth part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, sixteen of which are streaming on FilmStruck. To read the previous entries, click below.